India, Feb. 28 -- A meaningful resolution of the federalism debate requires a belief that the future of the Indian state, unlike, electoral politics today, cannot be a zero-sum game where one side has to necessarily lose in order for the other to win.

The federalism genie is out of the bottle again. Tamil Nadu chief minister Stalin has called a meeting of all political parties in the state on the issue of delimitation (a rejig in the number of Lok Sabha constituencies per state) in the country. He has followed it up by trying to build an anti-Hindi solidarity in the North of the Vindhyas by making an argument that a monolithic vision of Hindi has also marginalised a lot of North Indian languages into being seen as junior dialects of Hind...